During my time at Ordina I was placed on a project at Sopra Banking. Coming from the game sector, this was my first big .NET consultancy project, so I got a lot of hands-on experience with various .NET technologies as well as experience with large scale projects.
Sopra Banking makes loan software solutions for the financial world. Their main product is a mortgage loans system used by several banks in Belgium, The Netherlands and other European countries. I was part of a team that implemented requirements for a certain bank in The Netherlands. During my time on this project, I wore many hats. For the first few months, I mostly focused on batches that are run during nightly batch processes. Later, I did a great deal of work on the deposit and prepayment systems, including UI work for the user web portal.
Sopra's branch in Mechelen grew from a small company of about 25 people to over a 100 people in the course of two years. However, the way they were organized hadn't changed during those years, resulting in a lot of problems and late projects. Ordina performed an internal audit and afterwards Sopra created a workgroup that would modernize their development procedures based on the audit report. I was part of this group and mostly focused on integrating TFS 2015 into their development chain, introducing Scrum as well as creating custom tooling to increase programmer productivity.
Sopra has their own Batch Framework to run nightly processes. This framework was developed by one of their lead developers, but as he was too busy with other tasks, I took over bugfixing and the development of new features. Tasks involved fixing multithreading bugs and implementing a blocksize based launcher, in addition to other features.
For my last couple of months at Sopra, I was part of the performance monitoring and optimisations team. Tasks included database and query optimisations, improvement of the code that interacts with the database and reworking the data retrieval of certain UI screens and WCF services.